Another Art Sting

You may have seen this Peruvian headdress in the news last week, stolen 20 years ago and finally unearthed in the UK. It turns out the police recovered it thanks to another sting by Michel van Rijn, whom the BBC has dubbed "the Indiana Jones of Chelsea". I saw a TV programme about this character, well worth viewing if it gets a repeat. If you missed it, click the title link to fill in this major gap in your education. Note: in 2000 a parliamentary select committee estimated that the illicit trade in "cultural property" is worth approximately $5bn a year and is second only to the trade in drugs and weapons! This doesn't include the legal ripoffs, such as selling wildly overpriced elephant dung to Tate Modern or a rotting shark to a gullible Yank. And we all thought art was about ... er ... art. How ridiculous!